Classical Languages - Greek

Morphology

Prerequisites: Foundations

Greek is an inflected language: a word changes its ending, and sometimes its stem, to show what it does in the sentence. Morphology is the study of these forms, and syntax, the next section, is the study of how they are used. This section sets out how each part of speech is built, beginning with the simplest patterns and moving to the irregular exceptions. Every page gives the rules, the notes and exceptions, examples with translation, common pitfalls and a short self-test, and the complete tables are kept apart in Resources.

A family of forms

A Greek noun or verb is not one word but a family of related forms. The noun λόγος (word) has the singular λόγου, λόγῳ, λόγον, λόγε and the plural λόγοι, λόγων, λόγοις, λόγους. A verb such as λύω (I loose) has a far larger family, built on six stems that the dictionary gives as its principal parts: λύω, λύσω, ἔλυσα, λέλυκα, λέλυμαι, ἐλύθην. Learning a word means learning the family, and the pages of this section show how its members are made.

Three habits make the work easier.

Learn each word with its dictionary entry: the nominative, the genitive and the article for a noun, and the principal parts for a verb. The entry gives the stem and the gender or the tenses.
Learn each form with its accent. The accent is part of the form, and it moves in a regular way, as the page Accent, proclitics and enclitics shows.
Learn the paradigms as patterns and not as lists. The endings recur: the article has the endings of the first and second declensions, the thematic endings serve the present, the future and the aorist, and the same set of endings with small changes serves the middle and the passive.

Parts of speech and their forms

Part of speech	What changes	Page
Article	case, number, gender	Article
Noun	case and number; the gender is fixed	Nouns
Adjective	case, number, gender; degree	Adjectives and adverbs
Pronoun	case, number, and for some pronouns gender and person	Pronouns
Numeral	case, number and gender in the lower numbers	Numerals
Verb	person, number, tense, voice, mood	Verbs
Preposition, conjunction, particle	nothing	Invariable words

Plan of the section

The pages follow the order in which the forms are best learnt.

The article and the nouns. The article comes first, because it marks case, number and gender and its endings mirror those of the first and second declensions. The nouns follow, in the three declensions: the first (stems in α and η), the second (stems in ο) and the third (consonant and vowel stems).
Adjectives, pronouns and numerals. The adjectives use the endings of the nouns, and the pronouns add the irregular forms of the first and second person, the demonstratives, the relative and the interrogative.
The verb. The verb pages begin with the regular present and imperfect and the two ways of marking tense at the start of the word, the augment and reduplication. They go on to the future, the aorist, the passive, the perfect and the verbs in -μι, then to the imperatives, the infinitives and the participles, the subjunctive and the optative, the verbal adjectives and the irregular verbs εἰμί, εἶμι, οἶδα and φημί.
Invariable words. The prepositions with their cases, and the particles μέν, δέ, γάρ, οὖν and ἄν, which give Greek its tone.

The uses of the forms, such as the meaning of the cases and the force of the tenses and the moods, are left to the section Syntax. The complete tables are in the Resources area: Paradigms: nouns, Paradigms: adjectives and pronouns, Paradigms: regular verbs, Paradigms: contract verbs and verbs in -μι, Paradigms: irregular verbs, Principal parts of common verbs and Accent: quick reference.

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